Friday, 4 December 2009

If You Fancy Some Pussy...

Under my crusty exterior, beneath my irrascibility and misanthropy, there beats a heart of the purest blancmange. For me this video is (just short of) a minute's worth of bliss, reminding me poignantly of my cat William, who departed this life a year ago this day, age 17 years. I know cats are no-good, wheedling manipulators, that they are horrible to mice, or in William's case to Greek cockroaches, and that they are total control freaks. Your dog will adore you if you provide him with food and affection. Your cat will take the food and affection as no more than his due. The dog will think you are God, and the cat conclude that he must be God. Despite this appalling presumption, I delight in every sound and movement of a contented feline. You can please yourselves.

And very much a one-man moggy, too. With me (and later with my mum) he was almost as affectionate and responsive as a dog. With anyone else he was aloof - most visitors only saw his vanishing ring-piece.

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Quite.

''Oh, don't the days seem lank and long,When all goes right and nothing goes wrong.And isn't your life extremely flat,With nothing whatever to grumble at.''

W. S. Gilbert

“The four most over-rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics.”

"Nothing optional - from homosexuality to adultery - is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate."

Christopher Hitchens

''I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.'' [Which could be law, Brendan, but we know what you mean.]

Brendan Behan

“It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvellous universe, this tremendous﻿ range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.”

Richard P. Feynman

''Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours. "Introverts," writes a perceptive fellow named Thomas P. Crouser, "are driven to distraction by the semi-internal dialogue extroverts tend to conduct. Introverts don't outwardly complain, instead roll their eyes and silently curse the darkness." Just so.''

Jonathan Rauch

''One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about human beings was their habit of continually stating and repeating the obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn't know about.''

Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

''The human species, Dinah sometimes thinks, is stark staring mad. People have no sooner got themselves born than they start to imagine the gods want them to flatten their heads, or perforate their genitals, or arrange themselves into hierarchies based on the colour of their skins. The gods require them to avoid eating hoofs, or to walk backwards in certain sacred presences, or to hang up cats in clay pots and light fires underneath them. The gods like them to slaughter birds and make incisions in their own skulls. The gods have put the banana on this earth so that the human species can apprehend that fruit as a miraculous revelation of the Holy Trinity. It has to do with their singular ability to think and dream in symbols. This is what makes the species so vicious. It's also what makes them great poets.''

Barbara Trapido'Frankie and Stankie'.

On God

Sick of it, whatever it's called, sick of the names.I dedicate every pore to what's here.

Ikkyu1394-1481

on trying not to be an arse

On Buddhist meditation:

'Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways. You can know all that with some sense of humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you’re coming to know humanness altogether.'